welcome to emacs-fu

Welcome to Emacs-Fu!

(If you want to read emacs-fu through your RSS feed reader, please read this)

This is my blog discussing little (and not so little) tweaks to make working with the Emacs Text Editor even nicer. I have been an emacs-user for the last decade or so. I spend a lot of time with it. Emacs allows near-infinite customization, and I am always trying to improve things.

Over the years, I found many little tricks & tips. With this blog, I'm trying to share these with others. I am not claiming I came up with all these things myself. Quite the contrary - most things are inspired by things I found while foraging through the web. Also, I am definitely not claiming that the way shown here is the only way or the best way. I am not an emacs guru - I don't even wear a beard. I do welcome comments with suggestions and improvements.

Now, regarding the content: I don't want to limit myself too much; but the goal is to have something short you can read in a few minutes and pick up something useful, maybe while reading it in a feed reader. While emacs' documentation is very extensive, it can also be a bit intimidating. I'd like to offer bite-size chunks that are directly useful (e.g. running emacs in full-screen mode), or sometimes some background information (e.g., about binding keys or .emacs itself). Also, an over overview of emacs terminology may be quite useful. I'll be updating older posts whenever that makes sense.

Sometimes, I might write a bit longer, if the subject requires it.

About the target audience: the tips here probably make little sense for people who have never used Emacs before; and they might be trivial for the true Emacs wizards. So, the target audience is somewhere in between.

The kind of tips here are meant to be small additions to your .emacs (or ~/.emacs.d/init.el/. See the ever-useful EmacsWiki for some general information about this. After you've added or changed a function in .emacs, you can 'activate' it by either restarting emacs, or calling M-x eval-buffer. Of course, you can find my full .emacs.

However, I would definitely not recommend copying my or other people's .emacs without understanding what things mean. It's much better to start from scratch, and organically developing your very personal .emacs so things work exactly the way you like it. This blog is really about identifying small, understandable and useful nuggets that you can re-use.

I am using the as-of-yet unreleased Emacs version 23; most things should work just fine with the released versions. XEmacs-users might face some more problems. But again, please leave a comment if something is not working for you.

There are many other excellent resources with emacs information available; I already mentioned EmacsWiki, and many other emacs blogs are aggregated in Planet Emacsen. If you're just starting, you can try the built-in tutorial you can start in emacs with C-h t (ie. press Ctrl-H and press 't'). I am not sure if I can recommend it – many things seem a bit outdated (i.e., using C-v instead of simply PgDown…). But I digress.

Some practical points: I try to prefix the functions/macros I define with djcb-. That's not just because I am so pretentious, but also to clearly separate them functions that come with emacs, or a part of other packages. Another practical point is that all the code snippets here can be used for any purpose, i.e. they are in the public domain. External scripts have their own licenses, which you should check before using or distribution them.

Finally: I hope this blog provides some useful information to Emacs-users everywhere. If you have an emacs tip you'd like to share with your fellow emacs users, please let me know.

You can contact me through e-mail (GPG-key); I am djcb in IRC and Twitter.